Guilty Gear Strive Producer Ken Miyauchi Looks to the Fighting Game’s Future

Guilty Gear Strive, the 2021 battle match, had already become the best-selling name in the whole Arc System Works show’s record only one year after its launch. Guilty Gear Strive, which was released four years later, has sold more than 3 million copies international, with over 3.5 million people playing it…

The first article on Den of Geek was Guilty Gear Strive Producer Ken Miyauchi Looks at the Fighting Game’s Coming.

Guilty Gear Strive, the 2021 battle match, had already become the best-selling name in the whole Arc System Works franchise record only one year after its launch. Guilty Gear Strive, which was released four years ago, has sold more than 3 million copies international, with over 3.5 million people worldwide, and the popular video game is still gaining steam. Guilty Gear Strive was a major step opposition at Evo 2025, drawing in a sizable crowd of competitors and becoming a well-liked pull for viewers both in person and streaming the occasion online, a tradition that existed for many years at the Evolution Championship Series, or Evo.

Guilty Gear Strive, in essence, has taken what was Arc System Works ‘ most cherished original brand to new heights of success and awareness. The post-launch DLC seasons of the game help to maintain the show’s continued growth and good response from the area for fighting games. Strive is wrapping up its third season with the franchise’s first-ever guest fighter from a recently established franchise. Den of Geek spoke with Guilty Gear Strive producer Ken Miyauchi at Evo 2025 to discuss everything Guilty Gear, including the surprise inclusion of Lucy Kushinada from the Netflix animated series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners as a crossover character in the fourth season.

” I really do appreciate that the success wasn’t just from us,” he said. It’s really about how the Guilty Gear community is supporting us, attempting to attract new players, and Ken Miyauchi-san says. This is our first time playing a game that has been in its fifth year and has been running for four years. Typically, what we’ve done is update the game by releasing a new version with a different title, like Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator and Guilty Gear Xrd REV2. There has been a lot of study and learning about how live service for fighting games should be conducted. We hope to improve our updates and live operations in the upcoming years by learning from those viewpoints.

Guilty Gear Strive‘s inclusion of a guest fighter was born out of a desire to reach even wider audiences for the franchise, along with consistently high player engagement rates from regularly conducted player polls by Arc System Works. Interesting to note is that the developers thought about including a character from a completely different video game studio, CD Projekt Red. Arc System Works initially inquired about having a protagonist from The Witcher, but it was initially turned down by CD Projekt’s Cyberpunk 2077 franchise.

cnx. cmd. push ( function ( ) {cnx ( {playerId:” 106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530″, }). render ( “0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796” ), }),

Hidehiko Sakamura, our lead artist, is a huge fan of the Witcher series. According to Miyauchi-san,” We originally wanted to reach out to CD Projekt to see if we could include either Geralt or Ciri from The Witcher 3.” ” At the time, CD Projekt was actually working on The Witcher 4 at the time. They were revealing that there were a lot of changes occurring in Ciri. They didn’t want to distribute the IP at the time to various IPs to ensure that the series ‘ branding would remain consistent.

With Miyauchi-san speaking directly with CD Projekt’s Japan country manager Honma Satoru, this early attempt to include Ciri or Geralt in Guilty Gear Strive sparked further discussions between Arc System Works and CD Projekt Red. With Satoru-san working on Cyberpunk: Edgerunners as a producer, he advised the Strive development team to also think about collaborating with CD Projekt’s ambitious sci-fi franchise. Before deciding Lucy Kushinada was the best fit for the Guilty Gear franchise, Arc System Works looked into whether other Cyberpunk characters might exist in Strive.

” We were considering possibly excluding Johnny Silverhand or V from the game. It’s difficult to characterize the game as a fighting game because the main character is the player, says Miyauchi-san. We ultimately decided to pick Lucy after looking into the characters and ultimately choosing a character from Edgerunners.

Arc System Works is still working hard to maintain the popular game’s continued growth and stronghold in the fighting game community as a fifth season of DLC is confirmed at Evo 2025 and Guilty Gear Strive is set to be ported to the Nintendo Switch at the start of the year. Miyauchi-san has been talking about his observations of Strive closely with its director Akira Katano, despite there have been no officially confirmed plans for a sequel or standalone follow-up. What the two would do if given the chance to work on a potential new Guilty Gear title have naturally been a part of these discussions.

We made a lot of experimentation attempts to see what might work better. We’re conducting a lot of post-mortem right now, looking at what really worked, what really wasn’t received well, and what was discussed in the community,” says Miyauchi-san. What could be improved is something we’ve discussed extensively internally if we have another chance to make a new Guilty Gear game.”

PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC are the current PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 users. The season 4 finale character, Lucy Kushinada, will be revealed on August 21. DLC for a fifth season is currently being developed.

The first post Guilty Gear Strive Producer Ken Miyauchi Looks at the Fighting Game’s Future appeared on Den of Geek.